“It’s because he was a Catholic,” said Mum as she spooned cottage pie on to Benson’s plate.
“Those guns will be the death of the Yanks,” said Dad. He started to eat.
“Excuse me, but haven’t we forgotten something?” asked Benson.
“Oh, yes. Sorry, son,” said Dad.
Benson bowed his head. “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ, Our Lord. Amen.”
“And Eternal Rest for President Kennedy,” added Mum.
They started to eat. “I always had a soft spot for President Kennedy,” observed Mum sadly.
Dad said nothing because he was busy blowing on a forkful of cottage pie. Benson stepped into the breach.
“He was a good Catholic and they struck him down!” he announced, his voice suggesting the onset of tears. “He could have converted the whole of America had he been given time.”
“He saved us from Cuba,” said Mum, remembering the tense evening she had spent in the company of Richard Dimbleby during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“How do you mean?” Benson asked. He had been in the monastery at the time, somewhat starved of news.
“Well,” continued Mum, “the Russians had moved all their rockets into Cuba and President Kennedy said ‘Take them away or else!’ “
“And did they?”
“Well, it was touch and go for a while but they did. It was a worrying time but Richard Dimbleby was marvellous.”
“He’ll be missed. We need people like him,” stated Benson.
“It’s his wife I feel sorry for,” said Mum.
Then Dad said, “He was a bit daft over the Bay of Pigs, though.”
Mum demurred, “But he was a lovely man. Such a shame.”
At half past six Benson settled down to his homework. He could allow himself no break in his routine just because President Kennedy was dead. Indeed, the death of a great Catholic encouraged him to greater efforts. Others must be ready to take up the cross so sadly laid down.
He commenced his reading of the critics. He had found an edition of ‘Hamlet’ at the library which had a range of criticism of the play drawn from all kinds of sources, old and new. Without much enthusiasm, he read what these people had to say about the play and made notes in his exercise book.
He looked out of the window and saw Eric, now grown tall, leaving his house and striding purposefully up the road. Mum had told Benson that Eric had a steady Methodist girlfriend. Mrs Jenkins, she said, was worried about him because she thought his work was suffering.
Benson, embarrassed, had studiously avoided Eric since his return home. He only had to see him to recall the awful goings on in the garage four years before. He had been greatly relieved that Eric was going out with girls. Perhaps it meant that their impure activities had not had any damaging effect on him. Benson greatly hoped that this was the case.
It was not the case with Benson, however. He knew where he stood and what, when he stood, made him stand. Quite often he would be sitting in class or at the dining table in the evening when pictures of debauchery would come to him and send his studious thoughts away. Sometimes, he would sit on, erect, trying to see what was happening to him as a joyous thing, a way of testing his faith and his love. But at the time it was usually harder to see things in that light. Up he would slink to his bedroom. There behind closed doors, sometimes still fighting, sometimes not, he would give way to telling himself a tale where he was hero-victim, tied to a stake of longing by a man of impossible strength and dimensions who would have his way with him in a manner which, he knew, cried to heaven for vengeance. Then the inevitable return of passion-spent commonsense and wonderings about when he could get himself off to Confession.
Already he knew that for him there was no relief. This was to be his cross and would last his whole life long. This was what would damn him or lift him, through a lifetime of daily pain and impossible self-denial, towards sanctity.
He had asked the priests for help. The priests had either pronounced themselves ignorant or advised more prayer. He wished that he had Father O’Callaghan to turn to. He had seemed to understand something of what was going on. But, when caught in a kindly thought for the man, that too would evaporate when he remembered his last days at St Finbar’s and the way in which the priest had failed to intervene on his behalf. Knowing what he knew, having been his confidant for quite some time, he felt cheated somehow, though he did not know quite why he felt like that.
He grew bored with reading the pronouncements of the critics. He pulled tongues at the book and slammed it shut, hard. He mooned about the room, surveying himself in the mirror for a while. The weight he had thrown off while away from home seemed to be coming back. Ah, problems! “To be or not to be. That is a question!” he said to his frowning young face in the mirror.
He went through to the lounge and told Mum he was going to the library.
“Don’t be too long,” said Mum. “And wrap up warm.”
“I won’t. I will,” he told her.
He walked up the road in the dark. He did not want to go to the library. He wanted to visit a friend but he could not think of any friend he could visit. He could not think of any friend at all offhand.
The library was a ten-minute walk from Benson’s house. It was built on the edge of a park which also incorporated a large cemetery.
Benson’s granny was buried on the Catholic side of the hedge which divided the cemetery along its length. The Catholic and the non-Catholic areas of the cemetery were not equal halves, however. The non-Catholics took up more room. They occupied at least two thirds of the allotted space.
Asphalt paths dissected the cemetery at severe ninety-degree angles, dividing it into rectangular blocks. However, despite the best organisational skills of the Victorians, the graves themselves had refused to keep to the rules of neatness laid down in the grand scheme of things. The headstones did not seem to face in any particular direction.
Benson walked up one of these paths to get to the library. It was dark and the new amber lighting from the nearby road did little more than distinguish between the path and the grass. The crosses and lozenge-shaped graves were barely discernible. An occasional angel atop a grave stood sadly silhouetted against the sky.
He kept up a brisk pace as he walked along the path, all the time repeating Eternal Rests for the dead people he was passing. When he crossed the hedge into the Catholic side he felt better and redoubled his efforts. After all there would be more souls up here in purgatory and fewer in hell. Prayers would have more efficacy on this side.
Momentarily he saw himself in the dark walking a straight path, like a cartoon sower. When his prayer reached the graves, souls in white nighties sprouted from the ground, smiled a quick ‘Thank you’ to their benefactor before taking off like rockets towards heaven.
But then he recalled that he was walking through a cemetery in the dark and gazed straight ahead for signs of the main road and the comforting lights of the library. He quickened his pace and kept a lookout to right and left.
That he had taken this route to the library was understandable, to Benson at least. The route that kept to the road also led inevitably past a public toilet, and he did not want to pass it. It had been in that toilet that his last fall had taken place.
Though more than two years had passed since the wicked deed, he still regarded it with perverted fascination. He could remember every detail of the place: the track that led off to it from the road; the three Victorian urinals; the stink of disinfectant. He had even dreamed about it. It had become a visible symbol for the invisible rottenness within him.
Normal sexual acts took place in pink bedrooms with veils around the bed and a crucifix on the wall. Perhaps, if Maureen O’Hara was any guide, they took place in storms on hillsides too, or on the balmy summer days amid green corn punctuated by popp
ies. That was where normal decent people expressed their love for one another. Benson, on the other hand, was attracted to a stinking toilet, where, scared, attracted, repelled, he grew, throbbed, came and went away miserable and damned. What would Maureen O’Hara think? Benson could not conceive of going to bed with Maureen O’Hara and doing her. He liked her far too much for that. Fancy doing someone you liked, someone you loved!
That day Benson had gone into the toilet hoping to see a man’s penis. He had succeeded in that and more. He had left the place running; indeed, had run all the way home and straight into the bathroom. When he went downstairs to face Mum and Dad he was convinced that his rottenness must be visible.
But the feeling of excitement he had felt on the way into that place had been ineffable. A heady mixture of sickness and wellness, giddiness and heightened awareness had suffused him. Did other people feel this? Or was it only him? After kissing John Wayne during the storm in ‘The Quiet Man’, did storms make Maureen O’Hara go all funny? Surely not? Then why him?
Benson therefore avoided the toilet because it was, for him, an occasion of sin and a trigger that released his safety catch, cocked him and made him lethal to others and himself.
Once inside the library he was still not free of temptation. He made straight for the Literature shelf and sought out a book that would throw some less divine light on to the subject of Hamlet and his works and pomps. But he could not concentrate. His feet itched, tugging him away from the safety of English Literature towards the evil blandishments of Travel and Anthropology.
Resolutely he resisted and for a few minutes browsed through a brightly coloured paperback called What happens in Hamlet by a man with an exotic name, Salvador de Madariaga. Probably a Spanish Catholic, thought Benson. But within the promising pages he did not find anything that diverted his thoughts from the Travel and Anthropology section. He put the book away and started towards the shelf.
But Divine Intervention prevented Benson from reaching it. He remembered that the Classical World shelf could be quite interesting too and that there, when he gazed at the pictures of nude men, he could convince himself that he was trying to foster an interest in classical art. But he only fooled half of himself. The other half knew what he was about. The hugely muscled, swarthy Christ was already turning his bare back towards Benson.
He did not seek out picture books, because he thought that all the other customers at the library would at once suspect the purity of his motives if they saw him leafing through A Pictorial Guide to Greek and Roman Statuary. Rather he made for books which had lots of print. By looking at the side of the closed book it was easy enough to see whether there were any pictures inside.
The first two or three books he sampled were a disappointment to him. Just heads and ruins on hillsides. But then he picked one called Greek Athletics and found, along with boring pictures of wrecked Olympic stadiums, several pictures of very beautiful men who hid nothing.
Not that most of them had very much to hide. The Greek ideals were remarkably like Benson in the pubic region. Positively pre-pubescent, he felt. They, like him, would be giggled at in the showers for not being well developed, for not being able to satisfy a girl. Hepher, standing towelling himself after a shower, his penis hanging like a cucumber, his slack scrotum, two new potatoes in a bag, supporting its base like a pillow, had said as much to McCarthy. McCarthy, as far as Benson could judge, resembled Benson in dimensions. Unlike Benson, however, McCarthy went into the showers in the nude, something, which, in the circumstances, Benson could just not understand. It was not really modesty which stopped Benson from baring himself to the other boys, merely a sense of shame and inferiority, a feeling that he did not match up. Had they been able to see him in the nude standing by the Classical World shelf searching through the learned, Benson-titillating books, he felt he too would be proud before his schoolmates. But then they would just laugh at his erection and debate its cause. And, of course, their cruellest conclusions would be correct.
He tired of the cold illustrations of white statuary and wanted to be at the Travel and Anthropology shelf. He could see it nearby, just to the right of the ‘Today’s Returns’ trolley. He was excited now and would not be put off by scruples. He had already fallen but had not hit hard ground. He was in that in-between stage where he was reconciled to falling from grace but had not yet taken full pleasure in the act and so was not at that precise moment a victim to the inevitable guilt that his fallen flesh was heir to. No, rather he was at that point that Adam must have come to, the point where he was criticising Eve for having eaten the apple but knew that he too would eat it. But those first male lips had not yet touched sin’s smooth intoxicating flesh, discovering as they did so, the maggot lurking beneath.
Adam was not very well built either. At home there was a big leather-covered Bible full of old masters. There was a picture of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It covered two pages just before the start of Genesis. Adam had nothing to speak of. But perhaps Adam was like Benson in that respect and only flowered when giddy.
Impatient to be elsewhere, Benson placed Greek Athletics back on the shelf and sidled over to Travel and Anthropology.
A middle-aged woman in a large blue hat reached the shelf at precisely the same time as he did. She started browsing at the top of the shelf, around Europe. Benson made straight for the bottom, South America, and soon found his favourite book, Vanishing Tribes of the Amazon Basin. Lots of writing it had, but also a great centre section crammed full of pictures. He had seen them before but not for some time and was thrilled by the sight of the stockily built Indians standing with families and staring at the camera, or aiming blow pipes at the trees, or bathing in the Amazon. They were beautiful and dark and would have made Hepher shut up for a while.
Benson ran his hand over one of the plates. Just then the woman nearby asked him to reach up and get a book on Corsica for her. This he did, and in doing so, noticed a section he had missed on previous trips to the library: Africa.
Back went Vanishing Tribes of the Amazon Basin. Benson gazed upwards at the Africa shelf, above his head but within his grasp.
He did not know where to begin. He read titles: Tribes of the Southern Sudan, Teaching English in Timbuktu, The Karamoja People, Ashanti Renaissance, I was a Mau Mau Rebel. The woman had moved away and Benson reached up and took down Tribes of the Southern Sudan. He noted with pleasure that there were plenty of pictures interspersed with text. Keeping the book close to his chest, and a weather-eye out for people who might see him, he started leafing through it.
The first set of pictures was disappointing, showing merely a number of barren landscapes with gnarled trees, groups of conical huts and herds of cattle with huge horns. He persevered. The second group showed a succession of black women milking cows, decorating their bodies and nursing fat black babies. They were more or less naked. Cheered, Benson turned the pages.
The first picture in the next section showed three warriors crouched around a camp-fire. The man on the left wore a pair of shorts and had been photographed from the side. The man on the right sat on the ground, his legs out in front of him, his thin arms supporting him, long hands splayed on the ground just behind his bare buttocks. But the photograph seemed to have been under-exposed and Benson peered anxiously, knowing that the man’s penis must be there, but not quite able to discern anything in the dark haze that made up the region. However, the man in the centre crouched, facing the camera and staring stone-faced into the lens. Again, the under-exposure of the photograph blurred the man’s pubic region but Benson could discern something hanging down between the man’s feet. It was not clear and it seemed impossible that it could be what he thought it might be.
He brought the book closer to his eyes, forgetting altogether the people who might be around and might observe him. He adjusted the book to catch the light better. Yes, there could be no mistaking it. The stone-faced man
was huge. He gazed at the picture, then, intoxicated, turned the page.
Photographs of other men, all nude, all beautifully proportioned, all huge, passed before his eyes. The library was suddenly as hot as Africa; the blood pulsed at his temples like an insistent drumbeat. He felt ill with pleasure and with pain. He found himself wondering if Brother de Porres had been like that under his cassock. Brother Michael had said as much. Was the singer in ‘Missa Luba’ like that? Was he carrying a penis of gigantic size beneath his trousers as he sang the Credo? How wonderful it must be to be like that, or, if one could not be like that, to have a friend like that!
A man had approached the shelf and was bending down looking through South America. Benson, flushed and confused, snapped his book shut. He did not put it back on the shelf. That would have given him away. Instead he put it under his arm and started looking through the Benelux Countries.
The man crouched and took out a large picture book. He gazed for a long moment at the front cover: Savage Innocents, with its picture of a naked Indian family. Benson found himself looking down onto a small bald patch in the centre of the man’s head.
He opened the book and looked at the photographs. Without any shame, he concentrated on each page much longer than Benson thought seemly in a public place. He pointed to one of the pictures, looked round and up at Benson and said, “Look at that one!”
Benson looked everywhere but at the place where the man pointed. He saw that the man had a beaked nose, and was terribly tall and thin.
“Er ... yes,” said Benson returning his attention to the Benelux Countries.
The man stood up. “What have you got?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s just a book. I’m studying A level geography, you see,” stammered Benson.
The man looked hard at Benson and worked his lips like Mum did when she wanted to distribute her lipstick evenly. “Pull the other one, dear. It’s got bells on. I’ve been watching you for ten minutes. I know what you like!”
Sucking Sherbert Lemons Page 20
